no adele thread yet?

A. I had all these chords I thought would be perfect for her. You know, little musical riffs or themes. I tried all these out on her for about two hours. She literally sat there with a pen in her hand staring blankly, and she just went, “I’m not feeling anything.” And then she went, “I’ve got this riff, this idea, that’s going round and round my head,” and I went, “Go on then, what is it?” And she went, [sings] “There’s a fire.”

I said wow, and I just grabbed a guitar and quickly tried to figure out what the key was. She had all the verses, that thematic melody that she uses all through the song. I put all the verses down as one long recording, and then we put spaces in the track to start work on a prechorus and a chorus. We wrote the core of the song — her verses and the chords — in under 15 minutes. And the rest of it was structured over two hours.

Q. Her vocal track that you recorded that day for a demo ended up on the album. Why didn’t you redo it?

A. Adele was going through something. She had had her heart broken, and she was in pieces, and you can really hear that, her anger and her sadness. Sometimes I just don’t think you can recreate that or fake it. My hunch is that we captured something in her vocal performance that was going to be very hard to recreate

the headline "Adele shows off her new £7 million, 10-bedroom mansion in new video" makes it sound like the Hype Williams-directed clip for the Swizz Beatz remix of her new single takes place in her mansion